Half My Name Is Fiction: Cassiel in The Stacks

The brass bell above the door of Pilgrim Lane Books gave a thin, silver note as Cassiel Thorne stepped out of the October rain. He shook the water from his charcoal coat and stood for a moment in the doorway, letting his gaze adjust to the amber gloom of the shop. Dust motes drifted through a shaft of pale afternoon light that fell between the front windows, where a hand-painted sign read BOOKS BOUGHT AND SOLD in faded gilt letters. The air carried the particular silence of a place where thousands of stories had been shelved and forgotten.

He had not been inside this shop in eleven years.

Vera Lockhart was standing behind the counter, a half-open copy of someone's debut novel propped against the register. She did not look up at first.

era turned a page, though her eyes had not moved across the words. The bell's note still hung in the damp air, and she recognized, with a small tightening behind her ribs, the particular way a man could fill a doorway without seeming to take up any space at all.

She looked up.

Cassiel Thorne stood just inside the threshold, one hand still resting on the brass handle. Rain had beaded along the shoulders of his coat and caught the dim light like scattered pins. His hair was longer than it had been in Berlin, threaded now with grey at the temples, swept back in a way that suggested both vanity and indifference. He smiled at her, and the smile had not changed either. It was the smile of a man who had always known exactly what he was doing.

"Vera," he said. Not a question. A confirmation, as though he had been rehearsing the word on the walk from the station and had only just decided to let it out.

She closed the novel and set it face-down on the counter, careful to keep her finger between the pages. The shop was empty. Helena had gone home an hour ago, and the evening regulars would not arrive until the post offices closed and the boats came in.

"Cassiel." Her voice came out steadier than she had expected. "You are a long way from London."

"I am a long way from a great many things," he said, and stepped inside at last, letting the door swing shut behind him. The brass bell gave its thin note again, and he glanced up at it with an expression of faint, theatrical appreciation. "You still have this bell. I remember it. It has a slight crack near the clapper, does it not? You can hear it if you listen."

"I have not listened," Vera said. "I have been rather busy listening to other things."

"Like the wind in the chimney pots. Like the gulls on the breakwater. Like your own thoughts, which I imagine are quite loud enough."

He crossed the shop with that unhurried gait of his, the coat trailing slightly at the hem, and stopped at the counter. He smelled, faintly, of vetiver and wet wool, and beneath that, the ghost of cigarette smoke he had never quite managed to give up. Vera did not step back. She held her ground behind the register, one hand resting lightly on the closed novel.

"I came on the morning train," Cassiel said. "I thought I would surprise you."

"You have."

"Good." He placed both hands flat on the counter, long fingers spread, and studied her face as though reading a page he had once known by heart. "You look well, Vera. Older, of course. But well."

"So do you. Distinguished, even. The grey suits you."

"Does it? I had not noticed." He tilted his head. "I had rather hoped you might tell me."

Something in the set of his mouth, the way the last word bent slightly at the edges, pulled at a memory she had spent eleven years folding away in a drawer she never opened. She closed her eyes for a fraction of a second, then opened them.

"It is nearly seven," she said. "The shop closes at six. I was only finishing the receipts."

"Then let me walk you home."

"The shop is not my home, Cassiel. My home is up the lane."

"Then let me walk you to your home up the lane."

"I know the way."

"I am aware." He smiled again, and this time the smile was gentler, with something almost like apology in the creases at the corners of his eyes. "But it has been eleven years. And I find I would like to see the harbour after dark. I used to love the harbour after dark."

The rain had thinned to a fine mist by the time they stepped out onto Pilgrim Lane. The cobbles glistened under the amber spill of the streetlamps, and the air tasted of salt and wet stone. Vera had pulled on her waxed jacket and a knitted scarf the colour of bracken, and she walked with her hands in her pockets, her shoulder bag against her hip. Cassiel kept pace beside her, the collar of his coat turned up, his breath making small pale clouds in the lamplight.

For a while neither of them spoke. The lane wound down toward the water, past the shuttered windows of the closed galleries and the silent pubs with their brass beer engines dim behind polished glass. A cat crossed their path, paused to consider them with green indifference, and vanished into a hedge. Somewhere a television murmured behind a curtain, the muffled laughter of a studio audience.

"You have not asked me why I am here," Cassiel said at last.

"I assumed you would tell me when you were ready."

"How very Devon of you."

"How very London of me to have learned patience."

He laughed, and the sound surprised her. It was the same laugh, low and unhurried, the laugh she had first heard in the back garden of his aunt's house in Highgate, where the roses had been late that year and the chairs had still been damp from the morning rain. She remembered how he had laughed then, with his head tipped back and his eyes closed, as though he had been letting something go.

They reached the harbour wall and stopped. The tide was in, the black water lapping softly against the stone. Across the bay, the string of lights along the Esplanade trembled faintly in the mist, each one doubled by its own reflection. A single boat rocked at its mooring, its mast lamp swaying in a slow arc.

Cassiel leaned his forearms on the wall and looked out at the water. Vera stood a careful half-step away, her shoulder almost touching his but not quite.

"Tell me about the novels," he said.

"There are seven of them now."

"Seven. Good Lord."

"They sell reasonably well in Germany, as it happens."

"I am not surprised. You always did write the kind of sentences that translate well. The bones of them are English, but the muscle is universal."

"That is either a compliment or a criticism."

"It is both. It is always both, with you." He turned his head slightly, and she could feel the warmth of his attention on the side of her face. "Are you still writing about the same things?"

"I am writing about different things in the same way."

"That sounds like something Helena would say."

Vera did not answer. She watched a gull drift across the lamplight, its wingbeats silent, its belly pale as paper.

"You never married," Cassiel said.

"No."

"Not once?"

"Not once." She kept her eyes on the water. "I was asked. Twice, in fact."

"And?"

"And I said no. Both times."

"Why?"

She was quiet for a long moment. The harbour bell on the breakwater gave its single low note, marking the half hour, and the sound moved across the water like a stone dropped into still air.

"Because I had already known what it was to be understood," she said at last, "and I could not bear to settle for less."

She felt him go very still beside her. When he spoke again, his voice was lower, stripped of its usual polish.

"Your aunt's funeral," he said. "That is where we met."

"In the back garden. You were smoking behind the rose arch because you could not face the sandwiches."

"I have never been able to face sandwiches at a funeral. They are always so aggressively ham."

"You were wearing a dark green tie, and you had not shaved. You looked like a man who had come to the wrong party."

"I had come to the correct party," he said. "I simply had not realised it yet."

The mist had thickened. The lights across the bay blurred into soft gold smears, and the air smelled of brine and the wet rope of the moored boats. Vera pulled her scarf a little tighter and turned to face him.

"You stayed for three days after the funeral," she said. "You helped me clear the gutters and you read aloud from your aunt's diary, which I am still not convinced you had permission to do."

"I had implicit permission."

"You had no such thing."

"Implicit, Vera. From the tone of the entries."

She shook her head, but she was almost smiling. "And then you went back to Berlin."

"I had the residency."

"You had the residency," she agreed. "And you wrote me letters. Fifteen of them, in six months."

"Sixteen," he said. "The first one I threw away because it was too honest."

"And the others?"

"Were dishonest in increasingly interesting ways." He turned to face her as well, and for a moment they were very close, the lamplight catching the small lines at the corners of his eyes, the faint silver at his temples. "You never answered any of them."

"I answered every one."

"You wrote two sentences in the margin of a card and posted it back."

"Those two sentences were perfectly adequate."

"They were. They were also perfectly unbearable." He reached into the breast pocket of his coat and produced, with the air of a man performing a conjuring trick, a small leather wallet, much creased, and from it drew a single folded square of paper. He held it out to her.

She did not take it.

"Cassiel."

"It is the card," he said. "The first one. The one with your two sentences."

"Why do you have it?"

"Because I asked you to return it, and you did. And then I kept it, because I am, as you once observed, a sentimentalist disguised as a pragmatist."

Vera looked at the folded square. The paper had yellowed at the edges. She could see, even in the dim light, the faint blue of her own fountain pen ink along the fold.

"You came all this way," she said slowly, "to show me a card I wrote eleven years ago."

"I came all this way to ask you a question."

"And you thought you needed a prop."

"I thought I might need courage. I have found I do not." He tucked the card back into the wallet and slipped it into his pocket. "The question is this. Why did you never come to Berlin?"

The harbour bell tolled again, and somewhere down the quay a door opened and shut, and footsteps hurried away into the mist. Vera closed her eyes. When she opened them, he was watching her with the expression he had worn the night he had told her he was leaving: the expression of a man offering a gift he knew would be refused, and refusing to take it back.

"Because I had the children," she said. "Margot was seven. Daniel was four. Hannah was still in nappies. I could not take them to a damp flat in Kreuzberg and call it an adventure."

"You could have come alone."

"I could have," she said. "And when I came back, I would have been a different mother. And they would have known."

"And that was worse than losing you."

"It was worse than losing me," Vera said. "Because losing me would have been honest. Staying and becoming a stranger would have been a lie."

He was quiet for a long time. The tide had begun to turn, and the small waves against the wall had a different rhythm now, slightly sharper, as though the water were clearing its throat.

"You should have told me that then," he said at last.

"I could not. I did not have the words."

"You always had the words. You simply did not trust them."

"Perhaps." She turned to face the water again, and after a moment he turned with her. "And you should have stayed."

"I could not," he said. "I had the work."

"And the work was more important."

"The work was everything," he said. "Until it was not. And by then it was too late."

The mist had begun to lift, and across the bay the lights along the Esplanade sharpened into their proper shapes again, each one a small bright nail driven into the dark. Vera watched them for a long moment, and then she reached into her pocket and took out her keys. They were cold in her palm, and the brass of the harbour key bit lightly into her skin.

"Come and have a whisky," she said. "It is too cold for honesty out here."

He did not move. "If I come up the lane, Vera, I will stay for the whisky, and I will stay for the fire, and I will stay until you tell me to leave. And I am not certain I will go when you tell me."

"Then I will not tell you," she said. "Not tonight."

She turned toward the lane, and after a moment she heard his footsteps fall in behind hers, steady on the wet cobbles, and the two of them climbed together out of the harbour, into the town, into the lamplight that waited above.

rose in a series of gentle bends, the cobbles catching the lamplight in long wet seams, and at the top the town opened into a small square where the fishermen's chapel stood with its door propped open to the night. Vera led him not toward her own cottage, which stood further along behind the rowan tree, but toward the public house on the corner, the one with the green shutters and the brass bell above the door that no one rang anymore.

Inside, the fire was low. The barman, recognising Vera, set down two glasses without being asked and poured from a bottle she kept beneath the bar for nights like this one, and Cassiel Thorne took his glass in both hands as though he were afraid it might slip through his fingers if he were not careful.

She watched him over the rim of her own glass. He looked thinner than she remembered, though his shoulders still had that actor's breadth that had first caught her eye in the back row of a lecture hall twenty-three years ago. The grey at his temples was new. The lines around his mouth were not.

"You have come a long way," she said, "to drink my whisky and tell me I am hiding."

"I have come a long way," he said, "because I have a project."

She set the glass down. "I do not want a project, Cassiel."

"It is not that kind of project. It is not a book. It is not an article. It is a series of photographs."

She said nothing. The fire cracked, and a coal shifted in the grate, sending up a brief flare of orange that threw their shadows against the panelled wall behind them. Outside, a fisherman came in from the wet, stamped his boots, ordered a half, and stood at the far end of the bar reading the racing page with the solemn attention of a man who had once lost a great deal of money on a grey horse named Evening.

"Tell me," she said at last, because she knew he would tell her whether she asked or not.

"It is an exhibition," Cassiel said. He set his glass down and his hands came together, the fingers laced, the way they always did when he was about to say something he had been rehearsing. "It is about forgetting. The slow work of it. The way a face goes soft at the edges, the way a name you once knew by heart becomes a shape in the mouth. I want to photograph the threshold. The moment just before something is lost. I want to photograph people who are still themselves, but only just."

Vera turned the glass between her palms. "You want to photograph my mother."

He did not deny it. "I want to photograph you, Vera. But you would not sit for me. And your mother would."

"No."

"You have not heard what I would ask of her."

"I do not need to hear it, Cassiel. I know what you would do with it. You would make it beautiful, and then you would make it mean something else, and then you would sell the meaning for more than it cost you to take the picture. That is what you do. That is what you have always done."

He smiled, and the smile was the one she remembered, the one that had once made her feel as though she were the only woman in the room and might be the only woman in the world. "I have not changed as much as you would like to believe."

"No," she said. "You have changed exactly as much as I feared."

The fisherman at the far end of the bar turned a page, and the paper crackled in the silence.

"I am not asking for an answer tonight," Cassiel said. "I am asking you to think about it. Your mother is eighty-six. She is sharp, but the sharpness is uneven. There are mornings now when she does not remember whether she has had breakfast, and afternoons when she can describe the exact colour of a hat from 1962. I have seen it. I have watched her. She sat with me for an hour in the garden yesterday and told me about a man she once loved in Truro, and when she finished the story she could not remember that she had told it."

Vera's hand tightened around the glass. "You spoke to her without asking me."

"I spoke to her because I was in the garden, and she was in the garden, and she asked me to sit down. I did not bring a camera. I did not take notes. I listened."

"Then why are you telling me this?"

"Because I want you to see her the way I saw her. She is not what you think she is, Vera. She is not the cold matriarch of your books, with the iron spine and the locked drawer. She is a woman who is forgetting, and who is frightened of the forgetting, and who has not told you because she does not want to frighten you in return."

Vera did not answer for a long time. The fire settled, and the barman came and went with a cloth, polishing a glass that did not need polishing, and outside a car passed on the wet road and the headlights threw a moving stripe of light across the ceiling.

"All right," she said at last, and the words came out quieter than she had intended. "All right, Cassiel. But on my terms."

"Tell me your terms."

"You come to the cottage. You bring nothing. No camera. No assistant. No lights. You sit with her as you sat with her yesterday, and if she is willing to be photographed, and if I am satisfied that she understands what it is you want from her, then I will allow it. But if she says no at any point, the project ends. And if I say no at any point, the project ends. And the photographs, when they are made, are shown to me before they are shown to anyone, and if there is one in them that I do not like, that one does not go on the wall."

Cassiel nodded slowly. "Those are reasonable terms."

"They are the only terms."

"Then I accept them."

She lifted her glass and drank, and the whisky went down warm and sharp and a little bitter, and she set the

glass down with a sound that was quieter than she had expected, and the ring it left on the wood was the smallest of circles, dark with moisture, and she watched it fade.

"Tomorrow," she said. "Not the day after. Tomorrow."

"Tomorrow," Cassiel agreed.

"And Cassiel."

"Yes."

"She is not to know who you are. Not until I have spoken to her first. You can be a friend of mine from London who has come to stay for a week, and who happens to be making a small portfolio of portraits for a private exhibition. Nothing more."

"Nothing more."

"And if she asks me about you, afterward, about who you were to me once, I will tell her the truth. I will tell her you were the worst decision I ever made, and the most useful, and that the two are not in conflict."

Cassiel's mouth moved, almost a smile, and then it passed, and what remained was something more careful and more honest. "I have never minded being told the truth by you, Vera. It is the only thing about you that has never frightened me."

She did not ask him what had frightened him. She did not need to. The list would have included her attention, her absence, her long silences, her habit of arriving in a room and rearranging the weather of every person in it. She had always known this about herself. She did not see the need to perform the knowledge.

The barman came back and asked if they wanted another, and Cassiel looked at her, and she shook her head, and he shook his head, and the barman retreated with the quiet relief of a man who had been afraid to interrupt and was now grateful not to have to.

"I will drive back tonight," Cassiel said. "I have a room at the Bear in Exeter, and I will come to you in the morning, if the morning suits. Early, if possible. Before she is fully awake. It is better, I think, if the first sight of me is at the breakfast table, where there are teacups and kippers and the ordinary furniture of a morning, and not at the door, where one is required to perform."

Vera considered this. She had not thought of the staging of it, and she was annoyed, mildly, that he had, because it was a thing she should have thought of herself, and she had not. "Yes," she said. "Early. Before nine."

"Eight."

"Eight-thirty."

"Eight-fifteen, then. As a compromise."

"You are not, I think, a man who has ever in his life compromised."

"No. But I am learning."

The fire had fallen low, and the room was cooler now, and the smell of the woodsmoke had thinned into something almost mineral, the ghost of a fire rather than the fire itself. Outside, the wet road had begun to shine where the streetlamp touched it, and there was no traffic, and the silence of the village at this hour was a thing one could feel against the window like a thumb pressed gently to glass.

Vera stood too. She took her coat from the back of the chair, and Cassiel stood with her, and they did not embrace, because they had not embraced in fifteen years, and there was no reason to begin again.

"Thank you," he said, and the words were not thrown away. He used them carefully, as a man uses a thing he has borrowed.

"For what?"

"For letting me in. For listening. For not throwing the glass at my head, which I had prepared myself for."

"I considered it."

"I believe you."

She buttoned her coat, and her hands were steady, and she thought, with the small clear amusement of a woman who has survived a great deal, that he was not wrong to have prepared himself. She had considered it, and had decided against it only because the whisky was too good to waste on the wall.

She went out onto the step, and the cold came up to meet her, and the air smelled of wet stone and distant woodsmoke, and somewhere a dog barked once and then thought better of it. Cassiel followed her out, and they stood for a moment with the door closed behind them and the village quiet around them.

"The cottage," she said. "Do you remember it?"

"I remember the gate. The one that stuck in the damp."

"It still sticks."

"Some things do."

She looked at him then, full on, and the streetlamp put a shadow under his cheekbone and another under his eye, and she thought that he had aged well, which was annoying, and that he had not aged into softness, which was not. "Cassiel," she said. "If this goes wrong. If she is hurt by it. If any of it is more than I have bargained for."

"Yes."

"Then you will leave. You will not argue, you will not explain, you will not write me a letter about it three months later. You will leave, and I will not hear from you again, and the door will be shut."

"I understand."

"I am not sure that you do."

"No," he said. "I am not sure that I do either. But I will try."

She nodded, and she turned toward her car, and he did not offer to walk her to it, because he understood, as he had always understood, that there were gestures which were not his to make. She got in, and she started the engine, and the heater came on with a small reluctant sigh, and the windows fogged at once from the inside, and she sat for a moment and breathed, and the breath fogged the glass further, and she watched the shape of him in her mirror as he walked to his own car, a long dark figure on a long dark road, and then she put the car in gear and drove.

She did not look back.

The lane to the cottage was a mile and a quarter, and it curled through the woods in a way she had never understood, except that the original builder had been a man who liked to see his house from a distance before he arrived at it, and so the road obliged him. The trees came close on either side, and the headlights picked out the wet bark and the gleam of the leaves, and a fox went across the road in front of her with the unhurried dignity of a thing that owned the place, and she slowed for it, and it did not so much as glance at her.

The cottage came into view at last, low and white against the darker wood, and there was a light in the kitchen window, which meant that Margot had waited up, which meant that she had questions, which meant that the morning would be longer than she had hoped. She pulled the car up beside the porch, and the engine died, and the quiet came back, and the cold came back, and the smell of the sea, which was always there at the cottage, faint as a memory and as persistent.

She went in through the kitchen door, and Margot was at the table with a cup of tea and a book open in front of her, and she looked up, and her face was careful, and her eyes were not.

"You were gone a long time," Margot said.

"I know."

"Is he coming here?"

"Yes."

"Tomorrow?"

"Early."

Margot set down her cup. The click of porcelain on wood was very small in the quiet kitchen. "And you have agreed to it."

"I have."

"Because of what he said. About her."

"Yes."

Margot was quiet for a moment, and the clock on the shelf ticked into the silence, and the kettle, which had not been boiled for an hour, ticked too, as if in sympathy. "Are you afraid?" Margot asked.

Vera took off her coat and hung it on the back of the door, and the movement was slow, and her hands were careful, and she thought about the question, and she answered it honestly. "Yes," she said. "I am afraid."

Margot nodded, as if this were the answer she had expected, and as if it were the only one that could have made sense. She stood, and she came around the table, and she put her arms around her mother, and the embrace was clumsy, and it was fierce, and it was entirely without performance. Vera put her chin on top of her daughter's head, and the hair smelled of the shampoo she had used since she was a girl, and the kitchen smelled of tea and woodsmoke and the faint persistent sea, and outside the fox barked once more, far off now, and then the wood took the sound and buried it, and the night settled over the cottage like a hand laid gently on a shoulder.

"We will manage it," Margot said, into the wool of her mother's shoulder.

"We will try," Vera said.

And the clock ticked, and the kettle ticked, and the fire in the range went on with its small patient work, and the morning, which would bring Cassiel Thorne to the breakfast table of the Lockhart cottage for the first time in fifteen years, came on toward them, slowly, along the wet road, through the woods, under the stars.